The Human Pool - Softcover

Petit, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743417070 ISBN 13: 9780743417075

Publisher: Pocket Star, 2003

Synopsis

A geopolitical thriller covers six decades and retraces the steps of World War II spy Willi Schmidt, a mysterious man who died in 1945, but when former Intelligence courier Joe Hoover stumbles upon information that Schmidt is actually still alive, he discovers that he has become the target of those who will do anything to keep long hidden secrets buried. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author

Chris Petit is the author of The Psalm Killer and Back from the Dead, and a former editor of London's Time Out magazine. He is also a filmmaker whose directorial credits include Radio On and Chinese Boxes, and his documentaries have won several awards. He lives in London, where he is at work on his next novel, to be published in hardcover by Atria Books.

From Publishers Weekly

Conspiracy freaks with nothing to do can pop a Haldol in jubilation upon the publication of this third book from former Time Out London film editor Petit (The Psalm Killer; Back from the Dead). Joe Hoover, a widowed, aging wartime double agent with a mysterious disease, is summoned from Florida to Frankfurt via his old WWII call sign from Karl-Heinz Strasse, a former SS officer, 60 years after the fall of the Third Reich, for reasons that possibly involve the agent's duplicitous (and promiscuous) former boss Betty von Heimendorf. Alongside this tale of wartime pros gathering at journey's end is the tense, sweating parallel story of Vaughan, an English investigative journalist undercover in a group of neo-Nazi skinheads, investigating Karl-Heinz's life story for his boss, a bored media tycoon, while trying to get his mind off his incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Dora. As the story oozes in all directions through an increasingly disjointed series of letters, secret memos and drunken ravings by every member of the shifting cast, Petit conjures up a vague, amorphous hijack of humanity by vested political and economic interests perpetuating a warped biological testing program (on "the human pool") ... la Einsatzgruppen. The reader will be lost long before the realization that there is no clear resolution to the novel, just an ever-increasing background volume of paranoia, manifested mainly in poor Vaughan ("The second time I crawled back into the box voluntarily. The third time I didn't come out"). As Hoover himself puts it to the curious Vaughan in the novel's clearest exchange: "Why not leave it alone?" "Because I'll be dead soon and it's about time I knew." Readers may well echo his sentiments.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pocket Star
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743417070
• ISBN 13: 9780743417075
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 480